17 April | Cooking and Drinking | Golden Pig

Working with the fabulous The Golden Pig Food & Wine School (yes, they are so good I will even forgive them for that title, but beer is food!) we have developed some great cooking and drinking workshops.

These two-hour, mid-week classes are designed to be short, sharp & punchy while being fun and informative. Most importantly, they are great value.

Acclaimed chef Katrina Ryan, cuts the boring bits out of cooking and each class will each focus on an ingredient, dish or cooking style to give you some insight to the techniques involved. We then do the old, "here's one we prepared earlier" and Matt Kirkegaard takes over and matches the dish to a couple of great craft beers, which he explains, and you get to sample. 

The classes start at 6.30 and run for about two hours. So you get an education, a meal and beer tasting all for $49, not to mention great fun. There's a craft beer on arrival too.

The next class will feature Beef Rendang. 

Details

Where: The Golden Pig, 38 Ross Street, Newstead. (Directions)
When: 17 April, 2013
Starts: 6.30pm - Finishes: 8.30pm - 9.00pm.
Price: $49

Bookings via The Golden Pig.

Not quite mainstream, but…

You know that beer (and food matching) is starting to make headway when you see terrific articles like this appearing in mainstream media. I don’t know of James Smith and with the few ‘beer writers’ in  Australia I suspect he’s not a ‘specialist’ beer writer. (Willie Simpson is about the only one who can really claim to be a beer writer as if it’s a full-time occupation rather than a sideline.) But it’s a wonderful piece that conveys how good beer can be and how well it matches with food – a surprise to many.

It’s a funny thing but there is a section amongst beer writers  who fume when a non-beer writer writes about beer. I don’t know what the motivation is for this view, but I suspect there’s more than a little bit of the “one true church” about it. You need the high priests to interpret the Gospel of Beer. Outsiders can’t possibly know the truth about beer and the masses need guidance from the ‘Church’ to live a life in beer.

What crap.

The thing about beer is that, unlike wine, it doesn’t have those sorts of divides. It’s not owned by an elite cadre,  it is for everyone. More importantly, the more widely it is written about – particularly in such an enthusiastic piece – the better it is for beer.  I wish more mainstream journalists would write about it.

Beer –v– wine smackdown

About a year ago we did a beer versus wine smackdown on the Beer Show on 4BC. Three foods matched to three beers selected by me and three wines selected by James McIlwain from Southern Cross Wine Merchants who does a wine show on alternate weeks. On that occasion beer lost, 2-1. I was devastated. Last night we had a rematch. Beer won and won well.

The three foods were prawns, chicken satay and dark chocolate. The matchups were:

Prawns: Schneider Weisse Original –v– Meadowbank 2006 Riesling (Tasmania) Chicken Satay: Singha Lager –v– d'Arenberg 2006 Grenache (McLaren Vale) 75% Cocoa Dark Chocolate: Trois Pistoles –v– Rutherglen Port.

The judging was done by the host, Walter Williams, his producer, myself and James. Beer won the prawns match 2-2, but on points. Not convincing. I think if I had gone with Ian Watson’s suggestion of a nice golden lager, such as Jever Pilsner, I would have even done better, but the Schneider Weisse is an old favourite and I couldn’t be told. It worked but not perfectly.

With the chicken satay I had no clue what to match, as I wasn’t sure how it would be prepared. It ended up being quite spicy. I hadn’t had a Singha for several years and hadn’t realised that what was once an aromatic and fairly distinctive lager of 6% abv is these days a much sweeter, less hoppy beer of 5%. It was steamrollered by the spice in the sauce. Nice enough, but just didn’t stand up. In hindsight, I would have gone with something bolder – maybe even Alpha Pale Ale. I was amazed at how well the Grenache worked with it. Even I gave the round to the wine. Beer 0-4.

Then came chocolate. I knew I was on a good thing here. I pulled out Trois Pistoles from Unibroue. The Port went really well but the Trois Pistoles was superb with the dark chocolate. James declared the round even before the judging. Beer 4-0. Then I pulled out a haymaker…I had a packet of chocolate covered blueberries from the Noosa Chocolate Company. I passed them around and the panel tried again. The beer tasted very different, but worked. The panel was in raptures. Beer 4-0 and dancing around singing “In your face, wine!”

It was great fun and, as always, I found some wonderful flavours in wine and some surprising matches – that as a largely non-wine drinker I often forget. James is a great bloke with a fantastic palate. We might try and do a dinner somewhere together doing the same thing.

The great thing for me is that beer always holds its own in the match ups…something that surprises many and is another reason why increasing the profile of beer and food matching is good for beer.